Relax.

I handed in my thesis today. This was a "draft," meaning it is pretty much done but I'll have to fix the formatting to conform with the rigorous university guidelines. And it would probably help to get some feedback from my committee as well. But having turned in my 54 pages takes a lot off my mind.

We met at engineering campus this morning and headed over to the med school early. By 7:00 we were setting up the MRI scanner to do a phantom study, basically putting precision-machined pieces of various metals in a tub of copper sulfate to see how badly they'd distort the images. From our results we're hoping to be able to determine a maximum amount, particular shape, or minimum distance to be avoided in order to use these materials in our device while allowing the radiologist to get a clear picture of the injury site. But for now it was just fun to play with a really expensive really strong magnet. To give you some idea of what 1.5 Tesla is: it is 50,000 times stronger than earth's magnetic field, 5 times stronger than the magnets that pick up cars and trucks in the junkyard. And it was all ours for two hours.